Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

and their son enrolled in the eighth grade at Union High School, on the corner of Fifth and High
Avenues.
Ron liked Bremerton on sight, as would any thirteen-year-old with a taste for outdoor activities. After
school in the summer he invariably joined a group of boys to swim and fish and canoe in the
Sound and at weekends he cadged a ride out to Camp Parsons, the boy scout camp on the northwest
shore of Hood Canal. Parsons was a permanent campsite in the heart of the Olympic
National Park and was considered by thousands of boys to be paradise. There were oysters,
clams, shrimp and crabs to be fished from the canal and cooked over campfires; eagles soared in
the thermals high overhead and the dense forest all around the camp was alive with deer, beavers,
bobcats and black bears. Like countless fellow scouts, Ron's favourite trek from Camp Parsons
was the 'Three Rivers Hike', which started with the 'poop-out drag' - a long climb up a sun-baked
southern slope - and ended in the late afternoon at Camp Mystery at the top of the pass, where
there were meadows full of wild flowers and thrilling views over the Olympic mountain wilderness.
It was a boyhood idyll that was to last for only two happy years; in the summer of 1926 his parents
decided to move across the Sound back to Seattle. It was no trouble for Harry to commute to work
at the shipyard by ferry and they felt that Ron ought to complete his high school education in a
bigger and more sophisticated school than Union High. So it was that Ron began his sophomore
year at Queen Anne High, a majestic seminary built in sparkling white bricks on a hilltop
overlooking Seattle.
He was barely into his second semester when his father received his first foreign posting.
Lieutenant Hubbard was to take over as Officer in Charge of the Commissary Store at the US Naval
Station on Guam, a remote, mountainous tropical island in the Pacific, three thousand miles west
of Hawaii. Largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands, Guam had been ceded to the
UnitedStates as a prize in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and, as far as the Hubbard family
was concerned, was so far away it might as well have been on another planet.
May and Hub talked long into many nights about how they should accommodate their lives to this
new upheaval. Guam was a minimum two-year posting and May naturally wanted to accompany
her husband, particularly as there as no chance of him returning home on leave. What most
worried them was what to do with Ron, who had immediately assumed he would be going too.
Then just sixteen years old, he was thrilled at the prospect of exchanging the dreary routine of
Queen Anne High for life on a tropical island.
But officers returning from Guam were full of lurid stories about the island and its inhabitants. Many
of them concerned the charms of Guam's 'dusky maidens' and the uninhibited enthusiasm with
which they pursued young Americans as potential husbands. There was also much gossip about
the horrendous strains of venereal disease which were endemic. Time and time again Hub was
told by ex-Guam veterans that they would never let a son of theirs set foot in the place.
In the end they made the painful decision to leave Ron behind. May arranged for him to move back
into 'the old brick' with her parents and to finish high school in Helena. Ron made no secret of his
disgust When his parents broke the news, although he was slightly mollified by his father's
promise to try and arrange for him to travel with his mother out to Guam for a short holiday before
returning to Helena.
Lieutenant Hubbard sailed to Guam on 5 April 1927; his wife and son followed several weeks later
on the passenger steamship, President Madison, bound for Honolulu, Yokohama, Shanghai, Hong
Kong and Manila, out of San Francisco. Ron took with him his ukulele and saxophone, two
instruments he had been struggling to learn, and a headful of yarns, spun by his father's friends,